Man could face up to 25 years in 1989 rape

Published 11:49 pm, Thursday, August 29, 2013

Closing arguments finished Thursday afternoon in a 23-year-old rape and bail jumping trial at the Stamford courthouse that could send a former Stamford man to prison for up to 25 years.

The jury of four women and two men is set to begin deliberations Friday.

The case involves a woman who in 1989 accused former Stamford resident Richardson Victor, 45, formerly of 163 Spruce St., of raping her while the two were working for the same company as security guards in a Ludlow Street office building.

The woman, who was 25 and living in Mount Vernon, N.Y., at the time of the alleged sexual assault, said she was checking into noises she heard coming from a men's room in the building at 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 12 of that year when Victor, who was lying under the sinks, grabbed her and pulled her down to the floor.

The case has taken more than two decades to prosecute because two months after Victor had his bond reduced in 1990 and posted a $10,000 court appearance bond, he went to Haiti and never returned to court.

He later moved to Florida, and was eventually captured by Florida authorities in the summer of 2001 and brought back to Stamford that October.

Witnesses who testified in the three-day trial, which was translated for Victor by a Haitian Creole interpreter, included a state DNA analyst who told the court that evidence from the woman's rape examination contained sperm cells that proved to be a 1 to 7 billion match to Victor's DNA.

Victor took the stand in his own defense after the DNA analyst, and testified that his encounter with the woman had been consensual.

During closing arguments, Assistant State's Attorney David Applegate, who prosecuted the case with Stamford State's Attorney David Cohen, said Victor fled prosecution because he knew that he was about to have to give hair, saliva and blood samples that would have confirmed he had sex with his accuser.

Applegate also took aim at Victor's main line of defense, which was that the sex was consensual, and the woman claimed it was a rape after learning he had a girlfriend and got jealous. He claimed he learned the woman was lesbian, told her he'd never had sex with a lesbian, asked if she would to have sex with him, and that she agreed. He also testified that the two had sex in a car in the parking lot of the Ludlow Street office where they were employed prior to the night of the alleged sexual assault. He said that although he speaks limited English, he was able to communicate with the woman using "the language of love."

"It had such a profound effect on (the victim) that she forgot all about her girlfriend and fell for the defendant? Ask yourself whether it makes sense if a woman, who is only attracted to other women would, on a whim, engage in these types of sexual acts with a co-worker, in a car, in a parking lot, at work?" Applegate asked the jury. "The defendant was not nearly as versed in this language of love as he would have you believe."

Applegate asked if it was reasonable to conclude that when the woman found out about Victor's girlfriend that she was so heartbroken and angry that she hatched a plan to make him pay by claiming their consensual sex was a rape.

"If (the victim) sexually experimented with the defendant on a whim, any thoughts of following through on a plot for revenge would also have been on a whim and she would have abandoned them shortly thereafter. But that, as we all know, is not what happened," Applegate said.

Victor's attorney Joseph Jaumann told the jury that the victim's description of opening the men's room door and seeing Victor did not make any sense.

"If my client's intention was to rape her, why was he lying on the floor fully clothed," Jaumann asked.

Jaumann also took aim at the victim's explanation that she returned to her post after the rape and waited until the end of her shift before being picked up by her girlfriend and going to the hospital early that following afternoon.

"Is that how someone who was just sexually assaulted would react? Take that into consideration," he said. He also reiterated that at the crime scene investigators were unable to find any evidence of a rape inside the bathroom.

But Applegate asked the jury to remember the testimony of a rape crisis counselor who testified Wednesday that the victim was "devastated" when she met her at the hospital emergency room. He also asked them to remember the emergency room nurse who testified Wednesday how upset the victim was.

And he asked them to remember the testimony of former police chief Robert Nivakoff, who investigated the case as a Major Crime Unit sergeant in 1989. Nivakoff said on the stand Wednesday that the woman spoke in a low voice, consistent with how sexual assault victims speak, with tears streaming down her face when he met with her in the hospital.